Eclipse Server

RPC Software makes use of the plugin structure of Eclipse RPC not only in the CORE Business client but also in the Tomcat based CORE Business server. The CORE Business server exposes reporting functionality related to data entered through the CORE Business Eclipse RCP based client. In designing the CORE Business Server it became apparent that there was a need to reuse much of the same logic and components that also existed on the client such as Hibernate and Jasper Reports. The most obvious solution to the requirement of reuse is to repackage the classes need on the sever as jars included in a WAR file. This solution would have required complicated build scripts that would need to be continually modified as class structure changed. Instead it seemed far easier to make Tomcat "plugin aware".

The Eclipse IDE uses an embedded version of Tomcat for its help system. RPC was able to use this as a starting point for the functionality they desired. At this point they moved the servlet.jar file into its own plugin so it could be used by other plugins they had created which required the servlet API's. They also modified the existing Tomcat plugin to use the Eclipse JDT compiler instead of the standard Java compiler. This allowed CORE Business to only need the JRE bundled instead of the JDK. Finally, the classloader used by the plugin containing JSP pages was modified to load needed system plugins such as org.eclipse.core.runtime.